First, we performed a necessary site migration to a new CMS. The pre-built core components of Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) helped to speed up website development, reduce costs, and accelerate deployment. Extensive customization options allowed us to meet unique internal requirements and seamlessly integrate website components.

Next, we created a headless architecture for the new environment, which made it easier to optimise content management across channels. This helped the company quickly provide up-to-date and consistent information to home loan applicants.

We also reduced the time of tracking interest rate changes. What used to take up to six hours of a single person’s working day can now be easily accomplished in less than 30 minutes. AEM automation has simplified many other day-to-day processes as well, allowing the team to deliver timely marketing information much faster.

During the website optimization phase, we implemented sophisticated performance optimization strategies which improved the speed and operational efficiency of the website and helped us meet the needs of HDFC Ltd’s global audience. 

We customized SEO changes to accelerate time to market while maintaining flexibility. The changes quickly began to have a positive impact on website traffic and performance.

The public voting declared these following projects by DEPT®, BASIC/DEPT®, HELLO MONDAY/DEPT®, DOGSTUDIO/DEPT® and STUDIO DUMBAR/DEPT® the winners of the People’s Voice awards:

• The unique Web3 experience we created for fashion brand H&Mbeyond, which turned their showroom into an immersive, virtual experience, won for Metaverse, Immersive & Virtual – General Virtual Experiences: Arts, Fashion, Retail & Culture.
• BASIC/DEPT®’s website created for Cowboy, the connected electric bike, won four awards for Best Visual Design: Function, Best User Interface, Best Mobile Visual Design: Aesthetic, and Best Mobile User Interface.
• The website for the first NFT project by artist Jeff Koons won Websites and Mobile Sites – Features & Design: Best Homepage.
• The project for Google ChromeOS won General Websites and Mobile Sites: Web Services & Applications, and the work for Google Store won Best User Experience: Websites and Mobile Sites
• Crafted, the community initiative led by BASIC/DEPT® that brings together local creators and tastemakers, won General Websites and Mobile Sites: Diversity, Equity & Inclusion.
• JAMS – BASIC/DEPT®’s social experiment that connects people with curated playlists won Websites and Mobile Sites – Features & Design: Technical Achievement.
• The Patagonia Footprints Chronicles site won General Websites and Mobile Sites: Sustainability & Environment.
• The app for KFC won General Apps: Food & Drink.
• Webex won Websites and Mobile Sites: Best Navigation/Structure.
• For HELLO MONDAY/DEPT®, Fingerspelling with Machine Learning won three awards  in the Games category for Family, Kids & Education, and Social Impact, and in the Responsible Technology category for Accessible Technology.
• The site built to build anticipation for Digital Insight Games’ launch of Cloud Castles won two awards for Websites and Mobile Sites – Features & Design: Technical Achievement, and General Metaverse Experiences: Games.
• Demo Festival – the world’s largest festival of motion design –  organized by STUDIO DUMBAR/DEPT® won General Websites and Mobile Sites: Events.
• DEPT®’s very own Meta Festival – the first 24hr event in the Metaverse – won Metaverse & Immersive Features: Best Community Engagement, and Metaverse, Immersive & Virtual – Virtual Video Features: Best Festival or Conference.

Sustainability is no longer a buzzword, but a critical business strategy for 2023 and beyond. 

Globally, 95% of consumers consider a product’s sustainability to be important and 88% shared their intentional support for a brand that supports social or environmental initiatives.

But as climate change becomes increasingly dire, brands—together with the larger world—have also become aware of the environmental costs of technology and digital marketing. As much as 32% of an individual’s carbon footprint comes from advertising. And with $500 billion spent by marketers on advertising every year, you can understand how significant the industry’s impact on climate change is.

With that in mind, as both a digital agency and a certified B Corporation, we’d like to share some strategies for green-ifying your digital business and marketing efforts.

Tech is changing in more ways than one. Not only are innovations like Web3 emerging, so are ways of improving tech’s sustainability. 

When it comes to cloud environments and cloud-based architecture solutions, providers like Microsoft offer options that can vastly reduce your carbon footprint. Compared to old-school on-premises data centres, Microsoft Azure is as much as 98% more carbon efficient. 

Within the past several years, other cloud providers have also taken steps to increase their efficiency and reduce their environmental impact. To get a feel for how effective (or ineffective) these providers have become, it helps to use a metric called “power usage effectiveness,” or “PUE.” 

PUE is expressed as a ratio, with efficiency increasing as the quotient decreases toward a value of 1.0. The average PUE for an on-prem data centre is 1.70, by contrast, Microsoft Azure has a PUE of 1.18.

Given these recent developments in sustainability, we’re now helping clients re-assess their architecture and build a solution that keeps sustainability top of mind. 

By using a cloud environment based in Microsoft Azure, AWS, and/or Google Cloud, you’re not only able to build a greener architecture, but you can also automate key processes to eliminate overconsumption of cloud resources and better your system’s PUE. 

Thinking about sustainability can feel overwhelming at times. Let’s face it: every day the work we do in our industry inevitably puts more carbon into our atmosphere. 

That said, by encouraging folks within your team and at your company to start thinking about carbon more often, you’ll find that many small-scale changes add up. 

For instance, the video and content production team at DEPT® has started encouraging clients to donate £250 per shoot to offset the carbon emissions associated with the project. 

Although the team isn’t able to measure the exact emissions associated with a given shoot, their mission to do good has made a difference. In total, they’ve helped raise nearly £12,000 for the Woodland Trust, a British reforestation project that plants native trees throughout the country.

By learning to think about your emissions output, you and your team will start to learn how to weigh your options and make choices or create new practices that help the planet.

In the Netherlands, Plieger Group supplies a range of more than 150,000 items to installers, plumbing companies, retailers and hardware stores, among others. Their sub-brand, ThermoNoord, focuses mainly on ventilation.

For this project, Plieger Group’s main goal was to revamp its digital presence with a full-fledged webshop.

 “Our webshop was outdated, did not provide live stock information, did not work well on mobile or tablet and was not future-proof,” said Jeroen Heydendael, Manager of Marketing & eCommerce at Plieger, “It was high time for a change!”

By using React Native and Expo, we built a native iOS and an Android app for both Plieger and Thermonoord simultaneously using the same code base. This code base was directly linked to SAP as the ‘single source of truth’ for 4 native apps. 

Every version of the app had the same useful features, including the creation of different permissions and payment options for each user profile as well as the ability to have products delivered or picked up.

Because the app also contained a very large product overview—with 12,000 products from as many as 500 brands—we also added a barcode scanner to make it easy to order new products from local retailers.

We built the platform is built in SAP Commerce Cloud, using Hybris. Hybris allows users to build modular pages through Page Builder functionality. Additionally, we designed and built a separate component system that allows Plieger’s content managers to build their own pages.

The blocks we created gave Plieger the ability to design pages quickly within the brand’s guidelines with options for image placement, titles, rich text, colors, and alignment.

In addition to our work together on the new shop and app, we also supported Plieger in its digital transition. 

During our consultations, for example, we ensured the digital organization and processes we were using would align with the needs of various internal departments (such as IT, Finance and logistics). Going forward, the ultimate goal is to continue to develop the commerce team efficiently.

Besides further optimizing the shop and developing service features that “bind” installers to Plieger, this year we are also focusing on enriching product information and offering inspiring content. 

“The new shop and app are a great first step in our digital transformation,” said Jeroen Heydendael, Manager of Marketing & eCommerce at Plieger. “We still have a long way to go, but DEPT® helped us very much in terms of UX, creativity and technology. We are moving forward quickly with next steps, such as data-driven services.”

A key means for testing creative preferences is influencer partnerships. Influencer marketing, also known as creator marketing, is a core strategy in social media today as consumer behavior continuously evolves. Influencers boost the reach of ads by introducing the content to new, different, and expanded audiences, while also providing more opportunities to frequently optimize these ads.

Meta-branded content leverages a network of media outlets, celebrities, and social media influencers to share sponsored content. Each branded content social post features “sponsored” by the entity’s name to reflect a paid partnership between the content creator and the brand. This strategy enables brands like Framebridge to amplify the most popular content by turning them into branded content ads on Meta.

Branded content ads are an effective strategy for expanding reach, influencing intent, and increasing sales, largely because consumers appreciate recommendations of products and services from people like themselves. Creator content may feel and look more authentic to consumers compared to advertisements from a brand. The creator’s originality can provide a fresh and personable perspective about a brand’s product or service that consumers find more trustworthy and favorable. Meta-branded content ads often feature detailed accounts of the influencer’s experience with a brand’s product or service. This narrative inspires, educates, and provides audiences with a behind-the-scenes look at Framebridge’s framing and hanging process.

We recommended branded content as a solution to also beating increasing digital advertising prices. The value in this approach comes from the endorsement from the influencer. As consumers look for guidance in wading through shopping choices, influencer content stands out and an implied recommendation or stamp of approval from the influencer can convert customers.

Forrester recently published its “Now Tech: Global Digital Experience Services, Q4 2021” report to profile 37 digital providers that are helping brands with digital marketing, commerce and customer experience initiatives.

In their report, Forrester analysts Ted Schadler and Frederic Giron define digital providers as “essential partners to building [your brand’s] digital experience.” And digital experience means quite a lot. It embodies the combination of creativity and technology; everything from strategy, to implementation, to marketing, to optimization, and all that’s in between. 

From our perspective, the digital experience is just as essential as your brand’s digital provider. Maybe now more than ever. After all, during the first three months of the pandemic, digital advanced the equivalent of ten years. A year and a half later, the world is now more digitally literate than ever before. And it’s only getting more so. To make it in a digital world, businesses must develop digital experiences to both meet the current needs of their customers and to future-proof their brand.

When shopping for the digital provider that will best fit your brand’s digital needs, Forrester breaks their recommendations down according to size. DEPT® is relatively small in this standing, at about 2,500 employees compared to 25,000 at large providers. 

That said, what is the benefit of making your essential partner in creating digital experiences a comparatively small provider?

Forrester reports that, unlike the large and mid-sized digital counterparts, “Smaller providers generally don’t have the breadth or scale but may offer specialties that the bigger players don’t provide.”

Other major research firms confirm the value of a specialized digital experience. Mckinsey notes that a highly personalized, individual approach to a customer experience – particularly when a brand’s customer base is in the millions – boosts customer loyalty and gives that brand a competitive edge that is hard to imitate. And Harvard Business Review observes that in a world where digital feels almost ubiquitous, “there is no satisfactory excuse for a poor digital experience.” In short, if a brand does not successfully meet or surpass a customer’s digital expectations, they’re quick to move on. After all, countless other brands are just a quick search away.

We can also confirm the value of the specialized digital experience because we are highly specialized. Because “small” certainly does not mean that pushing out amazing global digital experiences is beyond our capability. Whether it’s the unique AR filter & branded hashtag we created for ASOS that generated over 1.2 billion views in just three weeks, the Lovie-nominated virtual landscape we were tasked with creating for the Eurovision Song Contest, or our work for Philips’s “Right under your nose” campaign to raise awareness of men’s health issues, we believe that specialized digital experiences work really, really well.

Our challenge was to fit three days worth of activities and inspiration into three hours while making it feel like it all lasted only three minutes. To do this, we decided to create a next-level virtual experience full of energy, a little crazy and above all personal. And that’s why we reimaged the physical experience and transformed it into a virtual one by building an interactive, 3D festival map which supported 15 stages across which more than 35 presentations took place.

Simply transferring all the elements of the original festival to a virtual platform would have led to a clumsy, unsatisfying result. Therefore, reimagination was the key. To kick off the process, we started by conceptualising our vision, the platform and the architecture of the event. The concept was crucial as this became our red thread both visually but also across our communication which we could always refer back to.

With a clear theme and concept, we quickly began to build our 3D map using React Three Fiber, a front-end tool specifically engineered to manage and bring 3D experiences to life. This, in turn, connected to Zoom, Slack and Vimeo. Our designers had the first version up and running in just a couple of weeks.

Apart from designing the experience, we wanted to excite Depsters with what was to come. So we crafted an internal social campaign which included daily hints from our zebra mascot and teaser videos. These social drops excited Depsters worldwide and conveyed that this was not an ordinary Zoom event.

In two months time, we designed and built a custom made a custom 3D festival map which one could easily explore and that was protected by single sign-on. The design and layout digitally recreated the festival site from the previous four years, squeezing in 15 stages and 35+ short and snappy presentations into a 3-hour event, and included some industry heroes like Stefan Sagmeister and Gmunk. A personal welcome movie by CEO Dimi Albers and DEPT® stage hosts made everyone feel welcome. With the help of Slack and ‘social reporters’, people knew what was going on all the virtual stages, creating a healthy amount of event FOMO, before and after the event.

Because of COVID-19, virtualisation has become the new norm and this will shape the future by creating new hybrid events which combine both physical and digital elements. And it doesn’t stop with virtual events, imagine virtual product launches, remote assistance and digital campuses. Thinking bigger, one could picture entire online environments that enable organisations to exchange knowledge or try out products and services in an accessible and personal manner.

For organisations that want to explore possibilities for their virtual event and beyond, we offer services such as concepting, designing and building a virtual 3D world, supporting your brand deploy the necessary technology and security to host a large scale event in addition to helping with the production side of things. Because, in the end, life is too short to host boring events.

Every brand, regardless of industry, is chasing similar goals: profitable growth, effective advertising, and data-driven decisions. For years, third-party data has been the key to achieving these goals. 

But what happens in a cookieless world where third-party data is gone? 

Data disruption has made retail media networks (and their gold mine of first-party data) incredibly attractive. Marketplaces like Amazon possess over a decade of data on user segments and shopping behaviors, which can benefit any brand looking for growth. 

But knowing the value of retail media is only the first step. For non-endemic brands without retail experience, you need a thoughtful approach that starts with Amazon.  

As the leader in retail media, Amazon is a safe bet for non-endemic advertisers. Its vast audience reach encompasses hundreds of millions of active users browsing various product categories, creating many opportunities for targeting non-endemic audiences. 


With Amazon’s purchase intent data, you can gain valuable insights into consumer behavior. This allows you to target your ads to users actively searching for related products or displaying interest in similar categories. For example, a brand could promote travel insurance to users who purchase new roller luggage.  


The contextual relevance of non-endemic ads on Amazon, appearing within a user’s shopping journey, helps their effectiveness. You can influence purchase decisions and generate leads through offers like test drives, attending an event, a landing page visit, or booking an appointment. Amazon’s performance-based pricing model ensures you only pay for measurable results, such as clicks or sales generated. 

In the coming years, expect more complexity:

• The number of retail media networks will continue to grow, increasing the existing challenges around planning, managing, and measuring media.
• Innovations such as Digital-Out-Of-Home will become a part of the media mix as retailers open up new inventory types alongside their online offerings.
• The increasing prioritization of non-endemic advertisers will change the competitive dynamics of programmatic advertising.

However, there is a degree of conformity within all of that complexity. All RMNs offer the same core advantage, first-party data-driven audiences based on actual purchases rather than vague interest. For the non-endemic advertiser, this will remain the most important consideration in selecting which networks to utilize.

Beginning your non-endemic retail media journey requires a blend of advertising strategy, experience with RMN technology, and data analysis. We recommend working with a partner with retail media experience to succeed in this new arena.